"Years before the Great War summoned Bess Crawford to serve as a battlefield nurse, the indomitable heroine spent her childhood in India under the watchful eye of her friend and confidant, the young soldier Simon Brandon. The two formed an inseparable bond on the dangerous Northwest Frontier where her father's Regiment held the Khyber Pass against all intruders. It was Simon who taught Bess to ride and shoot, escorted her to the bazaars and the Maharani's...

A memoir of Karachi through the eyes of its women

An Indies Introduce Debut Authors Selection 
 
For a brief moment on December 27, 2007, life came to a standstill in Pakistan. Benazir Bhutto, the country’s former prime minister and the first woman ever to lead a Muslim country, had been assassinated at a political rally just outside Islamabad. Back in Karachi—Bhutto’s birthplace and Pakistan’s...

"The former New York Times Pakistan bureau chief paints an arresting up-close portrait of a fractured country. Declan Walsh's electrifying portrait of Pakistan after 9/11 captures the sweep of this "strange, wondrous and benighted country" through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals. On assignment for the New York Times and other outlets, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to...

"The region of the Indus Valley has a 4,000-year-old history, being the site of one of the earliest riverine civilizations in the world, while the modern nation of Pakistan as we know it was created as a postcolonial homeland for the Muslims of British India. This Very Short Introduction looks at Pakistan as one of the two nation-states of the Indian sub-continent that emerged in 1947. Pippa Virdee reaches into the ancient past to understand the complex...

Chronicles the final months of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. August 27, 2010. Three CIA officers inform CIA Director Leon Panett that agents have tracked a courier with deep Al Qaeda ties to a heavily protected fortress at the end of a dead-end street in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It may be the end of the race to apprehend and bring to justice the mastermind of the most consequential terrorist attack in American history: Osama bin Laden. Wallace delivers...

A collection of intense tales of turmoil and tragedy that explores the reverberations of Partition through generations, from a mapmaker's gamble to a grandfather who cannot speak of what he escaped as a young boy.

In late 1970 a boy named Saadi is born into a large, defiantly Bengali family in eastern Pakistan. Months later the country splits in two, in what will become one of the most ferocious twentieth-century civil wars. Saadi tells the story of his childhood and of the ingenious ways his family survived the violence and conflicts: from his aunts stuffing him endlessly with sweets to stop marauding soldiers from hearing him cry, to street games based on...

In the days leading up to the partition of India in 1947, thirteen-year-old Bilal devises an elaborate scheme to keep his dying father from hearing the news about the country's division.